New Gender Possibilities?

This is a similar fantasy to the idea of the mall as a space in which you can shop around for another identity.

But you can't. At the mall, all you can do is use its social spaces, including cyberspace, as supplementary augmentations of aspects of your identity. This is perhaps a minor augmentation, not really as radical as some proponents of virtual identity might claim. You don't become a woman by adopting a female identity in cyberspace if you are a man in real space. Cyberspace has been seen as the site of a certain cross-dressing, or swapping of identities, that can only be phantasmatic and supplementary. But while entering cyberspace does not make the man a woman, it may make him see other possibilities for being a man.

--from "Embodying Space: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz." by Kim Armitage and Paul Dash. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. 22.

Persepolis, Satrapi, The Veil

Things have just sort of fortuitously happened that we read Marjane Satrapi’s “The Veil” in my class this summer. I happen to have a female student from Saudi Arabia, and it has been really interesting to get her own perspective on issues in the Middle East that I remain uninformed of or that I have been taught to think of a certain way. One of these issues is the veil.

Satrapi is the graphic novelist whose biographical work, Persepolis, was recently turned into a film and nominated for an academy award. She is of Iranian heritage, so it has been interesting to read about her responses and reaction to the Iranian Revolution from a couple decades ago and then compare them from what I have been absorbing from today’s events in Iran.

Below is a trailer of the film. I recently watched it on Netflix, and I have to admit it is quite the gem. I really think her animation is great, and the story itself is very interesting. I like how I could identify with her so much, even though I didn’t actually experience what she did.



We read this chapter of Satrapi’s Persepolis that is in our textbook, Seeing and Writing. I have been getting students to think about visual culture this semester, and one of the units is on gender. One of the things that I think about the veil is that it so clearly marks the gender of the woman. It is the woman that wears the veil. So, it made sense to me to include this on the course schedule. At the time, I had no idea that I was going to have a Saudi Arabian female in my class, but I am so happy I did because she able to enliven our discussion of the veil and gender issues from her own experiences. I have included some images for your consideration.





My Saudi Arabian student chose to write about this chapter. Her paper was really interesting. It was basically a response paper in which she talked about things she agreed and disagreed with in the chapter. I remember in class, she couldn’t understand why the children were so angry about having to wear the veil. I had to explain that one interpretation (at least the one that I was thinking of) was that it forced these children to lose their individuality. By all looking the same, they aren’t able to be unique, which can be a big deal to children. Granted this is my own interpretation, but it was about all I had to answer her.

I just purchased the book today at the bookstore because someone used it in a 1063, advanced writing class in the spring. I would like to start reading it this weekend on vacation as soon as I finish this other short-ish novel that I have been reading rather slowly this week.

This is exactly what I wanted to say...

Oh, my, thank you, feministing! Jaclyn Friedman is awesome.

This post is also here as a shout out to my friend, ToSomeoneLikeMinded. You wanted some activism, and while I didn't think I wanted it to, I'm starting to realize I need it. I want it. It is my desire to end oppression. To create equality. To make a difference.

Don't Ask Because I'm Telling

I know I just linked up this video/article from Huff Post on my facebook, but I wanted to write out some of my reactions. I think this is one of those things that sort of bothers me about Obama and about politicians more generally. They make promises or maybe say something about how they would like to make certain policy changes. It’s all bullshit. They are just saying what they need to say in order to get elected. I just think its crap when someone says he/she are progressive, and he/she holds onto backward ways.

I think the article is great when it snidely says, “Which is, of course, ridiculous. All "don't ask don't tell" is, is a policy by which everyone pretends that the gay and lesbian soldiers that are already serving in the military aren't really there, and that everything is okay provided that those gay and lesbian soldiers agree to participate in the Grand Shenanigan of Pollyanna Pretense.”

Why are people afraid of gays? I have been watching True Blood with some friends lately, and it is so awful to see how racists, sexist, and heterosexist people are. How closed minded they can be. Get with the fucking program. What’s wrong with gays serving in the military? When I went to London in 2006, it was the first time that gays got to wear their uniforms during the gay pride parade.





It’s harmless right. I mean, it’s not like they want to bugger all of their comrades. And if they did, would that be a problem? Why do we have to legislate love?

I have to stop typing this blog for time reasons but also because I am so angry that I feel a little incoherent at the moment.

Here is the full video if you don’t want to go to link above:

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extending the meaning of birth control

I recently saw the new film Angels and Demons at the movie theatre, and it has me thinking about all of these issues that I have with the Catholic church. Well, I guess one of my biggest ones happens to be their stance on birth control. And if you couple that with an odd conversation at Tulsa Studies you will sort of get the idea for this post. Hall announced to me that she and her husband discovered an interesting fact about Oklahoma -- that is has the highest rate of ED. Well, this got me thinking about sex and birth control and then the Catholics. And of course with this issue, a double standard presented itself in my mind because of recent cultural developments of the past decade.

With the advent of Viagra in the 1998, men with erectile dysfunction are able to have sex. If the end result of sex according to the Church is to conceive, then couldn't Viagra be seen as a form of birth control? It is altering the potential outcome of a heterosexual couple's chance of having a baby. "Pfizer, leaving nothing to chance, has even requested and received the Vatican's unofficial blessing for Viagra (according to this article in TIME)." I just think this is interesting because the Vatican condemns IVF and stem cell research. According to this article at Catholic Insight, "IVF violates the rights of the child: it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins and can hinder the maturing of his personality. It objectively deprives conjugal fruitfulness of its unity and integrity, it brings about and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood, gestational parenthood, and responsibility for upbringing. This threat to the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life." (Notice the gender at work here, too. Deprives "him" of "his" rights.)

While Viagra is not producing the same consequences that IVF apparently creates, it does in a way manifest a "rupture" in that without Viagra it would be difficult for the man to ejaculate. Or at least that is how my simple understanding of ED works. Any thoughts?

Sharing Some "Oh My!"

I came across The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould recently when I was reading some essays by Barbara Kingsolver. I don't have much to say about it except that it was a really interesting read. I wanted to share this particular section about female brains/skulls because I just thought it was too interesting not to.

Gustave Le Bon was a follower of Broca's school of thought in the field of craniometry. In La psychologie des foules (published 1895), Le Bon wrote:

"In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studies the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely. [....] A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera....The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women, leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear" (pg 104-105 of Gould)

To think, to give woman the same goals as man would mean the ruination of family! I guess you could see why I went, "Oh My!," when reading this. Of course, there was a bit of giggling at 3 am when I read this, but I still think it is important to discuss things like this. Undoubtedly, someone in America, or even the world, still thinks like this.

TV Show of the Month: Upstairs, Downstairs

For my British-Irish Modernism class, I have to create an annotated bibliography for the historical contexts of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. I came across this really interesting article by Carl Freedman, about the connection between the Merchant Ivory production and a 1970s TV show called, Upstairs, Downstairs. Thus, in the course of research and in honor of feeding my habit, I decided to put the first season on my Netflix, and I finished it just now. While the show covers quite a long time period, the first season focuses on 1903-1909, which works really well with researching the Edwardian period. The show actually starts the same year that Queen Victoria died and features an episode in October 1908, which is the same month that A Room with a View was published. [This episode was a little lame, "The Swedish Tiger." It didn't really fit into recreating history the way a number of the other episodes have.]

This TV version of Altman's Gosford Park has a number of interesting plot lines and twists that makes Altman's attempt to capture the intrigues of early twentieth-century British life as a feeble attempt at best. While their plots are not the same, the documentation of classed and gendered life in Upstairs, Downstairs is amazing! I would say the stand out episodes from the first season would be the first one, "On Trial," episode two, "The Mistress and the Maids," and episode eight, "I Dies from Love." The show does a great job of showing what life for the upper and lowers classes was like and how gender relations were conducted between the classes. Of course, you see the men cheating on women, the servants fighting and dying for the chances of love, and surprisingly, the mother, Mistress Belamy, having her own affair.

This video is from the episode where the maid, Sarah, and the Mistress Marjorie Bellamy are both being painted by this artist only for their paintings to be displayed in public, which goes on to create quite a scandal in the Royal Academy.

Along with the really interesting episodes/writing, the show has some first-class acting. The show went one to win BAFTA and Emmy awards. One of the anchors of the show is Jean Marsh, who plays the main housemaid, Rose, and in fact she helped to create the show with fellow actor, Eileen Atkins. [You might recognize Marsh as Mombi from Return to OZ or Queen Bavmorda from Willow.] I would also note that Pauline Collins, who plays Sarah, is another very interesting actress whose role on the show is great. I've never laughed so hard in my life.

Anyways, I just thought I would share this rather interesting "Bits and Bobs" (as one of my favorite EW blogger says) from Britain would be something cool to share.

Banning Bullying

Why is New York such a cool state? Answer: Because its Republican State Senators introduced a bill into their state legislature attempting to ban bullying in public schools. Key element to the bill: gay, lesbian, and transgender students would be protected under the bill because it will protect students and teachers of all sexual orientations and genders. Awesome.


Alan Van Capelle, the director of a pro-gay New York agency, said, “In a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy [and] Will and Grace world, kids are coming out at a much younger age,” he said. “As a community, we have done a woefully inadequate job of protecting them.”

I totally think that this is awesome that New York is doing this, and I hope that soon many others states will catch on. To me, this says that there are parts of America were progress and education have reached the minds of individuals. However, as per course, there are some issues with the bill. It won't be voted on at today's session, but hopefully, they will vote on it in the near future.

I personally remember a kid/possible friend/acquaintance from high school who was treated horribly at school because of his orientation. The worst of it was during P.E. one day when some other students threw rocks at him, which was just absolutely horrible and explains why I took extra-credit courses outside of school to make up for my in school P.E. credit. Maybe someday this won't happen to children. Maybe one day societ will be able to realize that we are all just people and that treating others with such disdain for no reason is not necessary.

For more about this legislation see the article in NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/education/08bully.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin